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Friday, July 13, 2012

There are approximately eleventy bazillion to the umpteenth power articles posted every day by people describing the latest outrage committed by the Obama administration and stating that they will not be voting from him in November. I've certainly written several posts like that here myself.

What makes the article that I'm linking in this post different is who the author is: Barney Bishop, a "lifelong Democrat" and former executive director of the Florida Democratic Party during the last few years that the Democrats had any significant power in the state.

In a devastating column posted at Sunshine State News earlier today, Bishop describes how he became disillusioned with Obama and why the president has lost his support:

[Former President Bill] Clinton was the type of Democrat I’ve supported my whole life, fiscally conservative while still focused on the needs of the hard-working middle class. Clinton famously declared, “The era of big government is over.” Barack Obama is a completely different kind of Democrat.

In every challenge that faces our nation, Obama sees a solution that can only come with another government-spending program. He fails to harness the ingenuity of entrepreneurs; instead he actually places obstacles, like burdensome regulation, in front of their path to progress.

Bishop continues, slamming Obama's "heavy-handed nationalization of our health care" and "unsustainable spending spree [that] has jeopardized the country’s credit worthiness and could ruin the economy for future generations," and focuses his ire on Obama's attacks on Romney's business experience:

Worse still, is the Obama campaign's persisting narrative that economic investment is bad or should be punished. Specifically, the attacks on the work Mitt Romney did in private equity demonstrate a dangerous lack of understanding of how important risk-taking investors are in the U.S. economy. Companies are created and grow precisely because of the funding of private investors. If we want jobs in America, we need to reward and encourage these investments, not make them the basis of hyperbolic attacks.

Bishop may be one of the most prominent Democrats to abandon Obama, but he's certainly not the only one. I have been hearing the same story over and over from Republican candidates (see, e.g., Sean Bielat, Karen Harrington, Jeff Semon, and Chris Sheldon) about their interactions with Democratic voters (as well as independents) this year: their enthusiasm for Barack Obama has been wiped out, they are very worried about the economy and government spending, and so they are willing, perhaps more than ever before in recent history, to give a Republican a chance.